1. Field of the Invention
An aspect of the present invention relates to reproduction of audio-visual (AV) data recorded in a storage medium, and, more particularly to a storage medium including metadata, which provide an extended search function using a variety of search keywords on audio-visual data, and an apparatus and method of reproducing the storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Storage media such as DVDs may store audio-visual data including video data, audio data, and/or subtitles, all of which are compressed and encoded in accordance with standards such as Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG). Such storage media may further store additional information such as encoding attributes of the audio-visual data or reproduction procedures of the audio-visual data. Accordingly, motion pictures that are recorded in the storage media are reproduced sequentially in accordance with the reproduction information. In some cases, the audio-visual data may be reproduced through a jump in a unit of chapters.
However, the conventional storage may not be reproduced through a jump to a desired scene in accordance with a user's search conditions. That is, there does not exist an apparatus or a method of reproducing audio-visual data in accordance with the user's desired search conditions such as scene, characters, locations, background music, properties, etc.
Since the audio-visual data are compressed, encoded, and multiplexed in accordance with the MPEG2 standard, conventional DVDs have problems in storing metadata that provides search functions on audio-visual data. Also there is little possibility to edit or reuse audio-visual data or metadata once the storage medium has been produced.